On the right, you can see a pair of fish (fish are an almost obligatory part of New Year’s Eve dinners because nian nian you yu is a phrase that can mean both ‘fish every year’ and ‘plenty every year’: so the dish is an auspicious play on words.) You can also see home-reared chicken, and chunks of meat from the pig the household had fattened up in the last months of the lunar year, as well as steamed buns (hua juan) dotted with food colourings to make them look more festive. In the cold, arid north, particularly in rural areas like this, wheaten foods such as hua juan, man tou 馒头 (plain steamed buns), deep-fried dough-twists (麻花 ma hua), noodles and dumplings are normally eaten rather than rice.

On the left, you can see several of the ingenious ways in which local people transformed one kind of food (pork) into many different tastes and textures. In the centre there are chunks of meat, on the bone; on the top left a stir-fry of lean meat and green onions or chives; centre bottom a kind of meatball wrapped in eggskin, steamed and then sliced; bottom right some ‘pearly meatballs’ made from minced pork studded with whole rice grains; and on centre right slices of a jelly made from the skin, which I was given in every single household, and which was usually made in a few different colours, using food colourings. And on the top left, you can see a few steamed buns, which were eaten with the main dishes.

Anyway, I must stop writing and start cooking, because I have some people coming over for a New Year’s dinner and it’s getting late! On the menu: spinach with either a gingery or sour-hot dressing (haven’t decided yet), spicy cucumber salad, a stew of red-braised wild venison with beancurd sticks, Gong Bao chicken, stir-fried pork and yellow chives, steamed wild sea bass with ginger and spring onion, Chinese broccoli with ginger, fish-fragrant aubergines (I find it hard to do a dinner party without them, and they are often the most popular dish), and a couple of other dishes TBC. Oh, and some of the winter meats mentioned in my previous post, steamed, sliced and served with ground chillies and Sichuan pepper in homage to my beloved Chengdu. The stew is simmering away as I finish this post, wafting out lovely aromas of fermented chillies and beans, ginger, spring onion, venison and star anise.

Happy New Year!

Sichuanese black garlic

“Hmm, this black garlic is delicious.”

“Actually it’s made from the single-cloved garlic of Sichuan.”

“Is that like the wild elephant garlic of Iran?”

Such is the conversation when you invite the cookery writer Anissa Helou over for a quiet Sunday night supper. I’d promised her something very casual, but ended up thinking about the  menu all weekend, of course. This is what we had:

A sweet, treacly black garlic clove each: these were a gift from the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo.

Smacked cucumber with a Sichuanese chilli-oil dressing.

Stir-fried venison slivers with yellow chives (made with superb venison from the Wild Game Company at Broadway Market in East London)

Stir-fried mixed mushrooms with garlic

Wild chrysanthemum tea from Hong Kong

Baby pak choy in chicken stock

Brown rice

A little fermented beancurd to go with the rice

The meal was a good example of the economy of Chinese cooking: we only ate a total of 150g meat between us, but, cooked like this, it was plenty. After eating the baby pak choy with our chopsticks, we drank the stock as a soup; and the fermented beancurd (eaten in tiny quantities) was absolutely delicious with the brown rice. The whole meal took just 30-40 minutes to make.

After dinner, we drank some wild chrysanthemum tea I brought back from Hong Kong, and ate tangerines and gianduja chocolates from Turin. Yum.

P.S. I’m afraid we had eaten almost everything before we thought of taking photographs, so y0u have to imagine what the dishes looked like….

Photo by Damian Brandon

Chinese President Hu Jintao was honoured with a state banquet at the White House last night. Apparently he and his entourage had requested a ‘quintessentially American’ menu, and this is what they were given:

D’Anjou pear salad with farmstead goat cheese, fennel, black walnuts and white balsamic

Poached Maine lobster with orange-glazed carrots and black trumpet mushrooms

Lemon sorbet

Dry-aged rib eye with buttermilk crisp onions, double stuffed potatoes and creamed spinach

Old-fashioned apple pie with vanilla ice cream.

It would be fascinating to hear what President Hu actually made of the dinner. He grew up in Jiangsu, in the refined, rice-eating south of China, and has also lived in Gansu, Guizhou, Tibet and Beijing, though not, I think, abroad. I assume he’s had plenty of experience of foreign food on his international trips, and perhaps occasionally in Beijing, so perhaps he has cosmopolitan tastes. Many Chinese people, however, especially those of his generation, would be less than delighted with raw salad and goat’s cheese, and with the prospect of eating a whole slab of beef, even if the meat was well done (rare, pink-oozing meat is an atrocity in terms of Chinese gastronomy). The main complaint of Chinese gourmets when it comes to ‘Western food’, though, is that it’s simple and lacking in variety, as I’ve mentioned before. And, reading reports of the banquet, I couldn’t help remembering an article in the Guardian newspaper of former President Jiang Zemin’s visit to London in 1999, which mentioned that the personal belongings that had accompanied him to Buckingham Palace had included ‘boxes of Chinese food’. I had a sneaking suspicion that the poor man, subjected to days of unfamiliar food at unsufferable banquets, was expecting to have to resort to snacks of instant noodles every night before bed.

A Hunanese government banquet menu

By means of contrast, the menu on the right is from a provincial government banquet in Hunan that I attended in November, at the West Lake Pavilion restaurant in Changsha, the ‘biggest Chinese restaurant in the world’ (it can seat as many as 5000 in its various halls. I first wrote about this place in the Financial Times several years ago, and it was later the subject of a 3-part TV documentary). As you can see, the menu lists 24 dishes, if you include pickles and the final fruit platter: slivered bamboo shoots with preserved mustard greens, pickled sweet potato, radish skin, rustic mixed vegetables, peanuts in old wine, crisp ears with coriander, cold cooked beef, snake with chilli and ginger, secret-recipe turtle-meat, pig’s feet with pig’s stomach, West Lake head steamed in a bowl (can’t remember what this was!), large prawns with green chillies, ‘floating fragrance’

An operatic duet

aromatic duck, steamed Western Hunan smoked meats, mountain goat stewed with mung bean sheets, Hunan-style Dongpo pork, secret-recipe bighead carp, claypot Chinese yam, stir-fried smoked donkey, Liuyang mountain bamboo shoots in chicken stock, Liuyang yellow vegetable, blanched seasonal greens, West Lake steamed buns stuffed with meat, platter of cut fruit. The ingredients and the cooking methods are many and varied, and the menu showcases a number of famous local ingredients. It does, however, avoid the more extravagant Chinese delicacies, such as shark’s fin and sea cucumber, which might be seen as inappropriate at a feast held at public expense.

The ironic thing about grand Chinese banquets, though, is that it’s almost impossible to appreciate the food, as you might guess from my very sketchy account of the menu. Banquets in China are about so many things besides food, including, depending on the occasions, social relationships, business, face; hierarchy, sycophancy, bribery, festivity… Like President Hu’s state dinner at the White House, the Hunanese banquet was a formal occasion, and the guests had very little time actually to eat. The festivities commenced promptly as 6.30pm, and finished promptly at 8pm. In between, as the dishes came

Orangeade, red wine, baijiu and tea - all you need for toasting!

thick and fast from the kitchens, there were speeches, acrobatic performances, songs and dances performed on the grand stage at the front of the hall. For much of the time, the guests milled around the tables, toasting each other as individuals and in groups, with tiny cupfuls of bai jiu (strong grain spirits), red wine or (for the teetotallers) orangeade. The general manager of the restaurant, Qin Zhong, who was so kind to me when I lived in Changsha, took to the stage for a stunning operatic duet with a chef from Beijing (she used to be a professional singer). A Hunanese celebrity chef who lives in Japan gave a brilliant performance of a karaoke song on stage. I was press-ganged into making a very brief speech, but absolutely refused to sing a song! Meanwhile, about five hundred guests milled around, toasting, exchanging pleasantries, smoking cigarettes,

Cover girl

and trying to snatch mouthfuls of food from time to time.

For me, the funniest moment of the whole evening, and probably my entire trip, occurred during a conversation with the government official who was sitting next to me at that dinner. He had seen my photograph on the front page of the local Party Daily, Hunan Ribao, which had featured the food conference which we were all attending. ‘Ms Fu,’ he said, ‘I hope you realise that even senior leaders struggle to get their pictures on the front page of Hunan Ribao’. One thing I never thought I’d be was a cover girl for a communist newspaper.

As usual on such occasions, I left entertained but still hungry, and needed a midnight feast before I could sleep. I was reminded, as ever, of the Qing Dynasty gourmet and food writer Yuan Mei, who went home after a 40-course banquet and needed a bowlful of congee to fill his belly.

A midnight feast in my hotel: congee, buckwheat buns etc

My afternoon ended peacefully with a visit to the Hunan Provincial Museum, to see once again the incredible Mawangdui collection. This is a large group of

Ancient lacquerware from the Mawangdui trove

objects that was unearthed in three aristocratic tombs on the outskirts of Changsha in the 1970s: one of the richest archaeological sites in China. It is particularly interesting to me because the tombs, which date back to the Han Dynasty, about two thousand years ago, contained a treasure trove of foodstuffs and records (inscribed on bamboo slips) of the cooking of the time, along with beautiful red-and-black lacquerware, much of it used for storing and serving food. Apart from the food-related remains, there are models of singers, dancers, a make-up box, a chess set, models of musical instruments, and textiles in a remarkable state of preservation. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, it’s worth making a trip to Changsha just to see the museum.

Illustration on left by Sebastian Wilkinson

The pleasures of cheese

You can read my piece about eating my way around Piedmont with Chinese restaurateur A Dai on the From Our Own Correspondent pages of the BBC’s website. Or you can listen to me reading it myself on their podcast for today, 13 November, on this webpage.

I’ll try to post a suitable photograph later!

For special banquets in the private rooms at Barshu restaurant, the kitchen can provide carved-vegetable centrepieces for the table. This carrot-bird ensemble is what one of the chefs came up with for a drinks party for Japanese visitors on Tuesday night!